The atheist Christopher Hitchens discovered, relatively late
in life, that he was Jewish. Not long after, he read a book by the Jewish
writer Jacobo Timerman called Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.
Hitchens reflects on the account of Timerman’s torture by Argentinean goons:

As I read the account of his torture at
the hands of the people who were later picked by Reagan and Casey to begin the
training of the Contras, I was struck by one page in particular. An ideologue
of the junta is speaking: “Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx,
because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud,
because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert
Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.”
Here was the foe in plain view. As that pure Austrian Ernst Fischer puts it so
pungently in his memoir An Opposing Man: “The degree of a society’s
culture can be measured against its attitude towards the Jews. All forms of
anti-Semitism are evidence of a reversion to barbarism. Any system which
persecutes the Jews, on whatever pretext, has forfeited all right to be
regarded as progressive.” Here were all my adopted godfathers in plain view
as well: the three great anchors of the modern, revolutionary intelligence. It
was for this reason that, on the few occasions on which I had been asked if I
were Jewish, I had been sad to say no, and even perhaps slightly jealous.1

This is an intriguing statement: why was Hitchens jealous?
What did he think being Jewish meant? Clearly, something to do with being
anti-Christian/a revolutionary – but what was the connection?Was it cultural or religious? Or, more
worryingly, was Hitchens making a racial point, and agreeing with “philosopher”
Alfred Rosenberg that certain genes predispose a person to revolution?

The concept of historical and dialectical
materialism was not an absolute and it did not have any supernatural element
but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might
arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctrinaires and
(after a while) its mutually excommunicating papacies. It also had its schisms
and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect that
admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we also
had our prophets. Rosa Luxemburg seemed almost like a combination of Cassandra
and Jeremiah…and the great-three volume biography of Leon Trotsky by Isaac
Deutscher was actually entitled The Prophet…. As a young man Deutscher
had trained for the rabbinate, and would have made a brilliant Talmudist – as
would Trotsky (pp.151-152).

Although Hitchens claims to have largely left such ideologies
behind (of which more later) they give an insight into his essentially
“religious” world-view (with its creeds, prophets and godfathers). In his
admiration for Marx and Freud, Hitchens sides with the great debunkers of
history. For Marx, the visible social and political structures are but a
superstructure erected upon underlying economic forces. For Freud, conscious
conduct is but a product of forces located in the unconscious. Both aim to
explain dialectical conflicts via materialistic/reductive strategies. And both
allude to quasi-mystical ideas such as, in Marx’s case, the Laws of History.

Hitchens admires those who adopt materialist strategies and
describes himself as a materialist (p.220). He buys into a particular worldview
(what was called in an earlier age “naturalism”) which seeks to explain away or
overturn traditional religion (and to some extent traditional scholastic,
largely Aristotelian, metaphysics and the moral philosophy associated with it).

Of course, as E. Michael Jones’ shows in his latest book, The Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History, at the heart of
such worldviews is a rejection of Logos a) in the Person of Christ and b) in
the form of the Natural Moral Law. What is constant amongst the characters
named above is a very firm rejection of both a) and b). And yet their
worldviews are, in fact, parasitic upon (though presumptive negations of) the
idea of a created world imbued with inherent natural order—a world of natural
kinds with their own teleology. Given what he tells us, it should come as no
surprise that Hitchens is particularly disgusted by and rejects the idea of a
personal God, let alone an incarnational one who acts with and is Logos.

Hitchens
is very open in his rejectionism and quite clear on what he wants to achieve.
In his excellent review of Hitchens’ book, Tom Piatak points out that, despite
Hitchens’ weak protestations of a “live and let live” attitude towards
religious practice (so long as it has no influence and no place in a supposedly
neutral public square) he is on record as seeming to endorse its forcible
suppression, telling PBS that “One of Lenin’s great achievements … is to create
a secular Russia. The power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was an
absolute warren of backwardness of evil and superstition, is probably never
going to recover from what he did to it.”2

So
deep is Hitchens’ dislike for Logos that he almost seems to suggest that
mass-murderers should be congratulated on their achievements in the
frogmarching of the religious to those places Solzhenitsyn described so well.

This
rejection of Logos is evident throughout Hitchens’ book, not least because, as
a pupil of the Enlightenment, Hitchens is interested in (whether he knows it or
not) what Pope Benedict XVI has called dehellenization. Indeed the Pope’s words
on dehellenization are worth citing, for they sum up exactly Hitchens’
approach. The Pope says, of this attitude, that “First, only the kind of
certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements
can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be
measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history,
psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this
canon of the scientific. A second point… is that by its very nature this method
excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or
pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the
radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.”3

II

Given this approach, it is worth, first of all, seeing just
how “scientific” Hitchens’ work is with regard to the physical sciences, as
well as historical facts. In the light of his reliability in these areas we
should, perhaps, judge his more speculative writing. Tom Piatak has already
listed a large number of factual errors made by Hitchens. I will outline some
more here.

Hitchens,
who constantly exalts the virtues of science, in discussing difficult questions
of abortion and contraception makes the following claims. He begins by seeming
to recognise the rights of the unborn, but soon tells us, in a prelude to his
views on embryology, that there may be circumstances in which it is not
desirable to carry a foetus to full term: “it is probably less miserable an
outcome than the vast number of deformed or idiot children who would otherwise
have been born, or stillborn, or whose brief lives would have been a torment to
themselves and others” (p.221).4

Hitchens
makes no important distinction between moral acts (aborting a foetus) and
events of nature (miscarriage). I had not realised that he took materialism to
such extremes!

After delivering these judgements Hitchens inveighs against
the “wild statement that sperm and eggs are all potential lives that must not be
prevented from fusing….” No source is given for such a statement, and it would
indeed be bizarre to claim that a sperm, say, was itself a potential human
being—as opposed to having the potential to help produce a human being separate
from itself. Hitchens then goes on to comment “On this basis, an intrauterine
device that prevents the attachment of the egg to the wall of the uterus is a
murder weapon and an ectopic pregnancy (the disastrous accident that causes the
egg to begin growing inside the Fallopian tube) is a human life instead of an
already doomed egg…” (p. 222). Had Hitchens read even the most basic textbook
of human embryology, or reflected on the second word of the phrase “ectopic
pregnancy,” he might have acknowledged that what he calls an “egg” is not a
gamete of the woman, but a human embryo: a human being at the earliest stage of
his/her life, who is already affecting the woman in all sorts of physical ways.
Had he acknowledged the scientific facts he would at least be in a position,
potentially, to make a sensible moral judgement. But, as well as attempting to
justify the taking of young human life (which he ‘scientifically’ decides is
‘not worth living’ in some cases) he is lamentably careless on the question of
when such life actually begins. Given that Hitchens accepts that a human being
is not a pure spirit, but a living human animal, it should be clear that the
origin of the human being can be traced to the origin of the human animal – the
fusion of the father’s and mother’s gametes (or more rarely, cloning or a
similar phenomenon). And human beings, as Hitchens elsewhere seems to admit,
have human interests and rights.

Of course, all of these issues are bound up with sex.
Hitchens’ attitude to this subject seems to be partially summed up in his
statement that “Sexual innocence, which can be charming in the young, if it is
needlessly protracted is positively corrosive and repulsive in the mature
adult.” (p. 227). So, all those celibate saints and others (including some whom
Hitchens professes to admire) are in some sense “repulsive” merely for having
chosen this particular way of life! It’s a view, I suppose, – though again,
little argument is provided to show that this feeling of repulsion is
rationally desirable.

As a good Freudian, Hitchens sees the problem in terms of
repression. There is much to be said about this view, but I will restrict
myself for now to what Hitchens has to say about AIDS. Leaving aside the
much-debated issue of holes in condoms – which is not quite as simple as
Hitchens believes – a much more serious issue is the documented increase in
cases of AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STDs) as a result of
condom failure and increased risk-taking.

Behavior-based
strategies or risk-avoidance campaigns have been welcomed by an increasing
number of researchers in this highly politicised field. Perhaps the best known
primary-behaviour-change strategy is the ABC campaign. The acronym stands for:
Abstinence, Be Faithful, otherwise use a Condom. Here, in contrast to
aggressive condom promotion, the stress is on encouraging people to change
their behaviour in ways that will reduce the likelihood of HIV (and other STD)
transmission. Uganda is frequently cited as a country which adopted an ABC campaign
and subsequently experienced a remarkable 31 percent decrease in HIV incidence,
with condoms playing only a minor role.5As one study argued “the promotion of
condoms at an early stage proved to be counter-productive in Botswana, whereas
the lack of condom promotion during the 1980s and early 1990s contributed to
the relative success of behaviour change strategies in Uganda.”6

So
much for Hitchens’ attention to scientific facts. So keen is he to spread the
AIDS blood-libel—as it might be termed—that he simply presumes, without
investigating the data, that countless AIDS deaths are caused by Church
teaching . He presumes, in his materialist way, that sexual behaviour is
irresistible for people infected with HIV, so that it is better they risk their
lives with condoms than abstain (which is, in any case, ‘repugnant’).Hitchens, a promoter of the sexual
revolution which helps cause these problems in the first place, also fails to
mention that the Church is at the forefront of supporting AIDS sufferers,
providing a quarter of all AIDS healthcare worldwide.7

In Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo’s words, which deserve a
better hearing than they have often received, the Church’s members “care not
only for the individuals but also for their families, in the most holistic
manner, respecting the dignity of the human person and the family through the
proper use of sex and promoting the life-long commitment of spouses.”8 If Hitchens finds this perspective repulsive, one wonders
why this might be so.

III

Still on the subject of attention to facts, let us examine
Hitchens’ forays into history. Predictably Hitchens brings up the case of Pius
XII and the Nazis. As so much has been written about this, I will not devote
much time to the topic, except to note that, incredibly, Hitchens completely
ignores the thousands of Jews rescued by Pius XII and does not appear to have
read the examinations of this period by Father Pierre Blet, Rabbi David Dalin,
Ronald Rychlak, Michael Burleigh, Martin Gilbert or others. Instead he only
refers to the thoroughly-refuted book by John Cornwell – Hitler’s Pope –
a book so fraudulent that even its cover photo constitutes a gross deception.
As Cornwell, who is not a historian, has seen his work so discredited, it is
laughable that Hitchens continues to take it at face value. Here is Burleigh, a
real historian and arguably one of the greatest living historians of the Third
Reich, on the issue:

Even when Catholic clergy were themselves
implicated in atrocities, as in Croatia or Slovakia, it is important to recall
that the Vatican had limited powers to control even its own priests in
situations where their nationalist passions were ablaze. As Pius’s own
secretary of state said: ‘It is a great misfortune that the president of
Slovakia is a priest. Everyone knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to
heel. But who will understand that we cannot even control a priest?

Since the 18th century the papacy has sought to be an
international moral arbiter. All popes have to balance leading an institution
whose purpose is to save souls with a general role as Christ’s vicar on earth.
Speaking out for humanity may jeopardise the first role, while specific appeals
on behalf of persecuted groups may make the position of others worse.

Too forthright a protest would lead the Nazis to include
hitherto exempt categories of people in their murderous plans, as they did in
Holland where, following just such a protest by the clergy, 80 percent of Jews
perished. Apart from not wishing to jeopardise the church’s international
relief operations, Pius also had to think about Jews secreted in churches and
monasteries throughout occupied Europe. These included 3,000 Jews hidden in his
own summer palace and others in the spy-riddled Vatican.

Since nothing would have stopped the
Nazis in fulfilling their exterminatory mission, should the Pope have
encouraged them in their quest by issuing a ringing protest? After 1945 many
prominent Jews… expressed their gratitude to Pius XII for the church’s help in
rescuing hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists. In 1955 the Israeli
Philharmonic Orchestra was sent to Rome to give a Beethoven concert in Pius
XII’s honour… Hitler’s Pope was really a friend of the Jews.9

One might also
note that Catholics in Germany voted against the Nazis, as Erik von
Keuhnelt-Leddihn demonstrated in his Liberty or Equality.10 We
might remember Maximilian Kolbe (whom Hitchens sneeringly alludes to) or Edith
Stein (whom he doesn’t mention). Or we might think of Dachau, which was so full
of sympathetic Catholic clergy that it evolved its own liturgical life, and
even a seminary where one priest was ordained.

Hitchens, in discussing Hitler, states that the Catholic
Church shared two important principles with the Nazis, “anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.”Does he mean that the Church
discriminated ‘racially’ against Jews? By not defining the term anti-Semitism,
Hitchens uses it as a bludgeon against his ideological opponents (and remember,
for Hitchens, anti-Semitism is worse than other forms of racism). However, a
racial doctrine differs markedly from a religious position that does not
advocate harming the dignity of any Jewish person and strongly condemns such
practices. One might just as well call Hitchens a racist for opposing Christianity
– even to the extent of praising, though with reservations, Lenin’s
anti-Christian achievements. Perhaps he would prefer Hitler’s less
persecutional (and certainly non-racist) attitude to Christians. As Richard
Overy recalls: “Religion was persecuted less systematically and violently in
Germany because Hitler expected ‘the end of the disease of Christianity’ to
come about by itself once its falsehoods were self-evident…. Both Stalin and
Hitler wanted a neutered religion, subservient to the state, while the slow
programme of scientific revelation destroyed the foundation of religious myth.”11

Such reflections show the absurdity of Hitchens’ attempts to
lump Nazis and Catholics together. He tells us “one can perhaps accept that 25
percent of the SS were practising Catholics…” (p. 240). Does he not know that
every SS man had a membership file, where ‘religious affiliation’ had to be
filled in? In Himmler’s correspondence there are numerous letters in which
individual SS leaders were questioned on this point (a selection of Himmler
letters was edited by Helmut Heiber). It transpires that the SS required
of every member that they renounce the Christian faith before joining. That
means that the major perpetrators of the Holocaust were effectively not Christians
any more. Hitchens may perhaps be excused for not knowing this, as even many
historians of Nazism have been silent on the subject.

In relation to Bolshevism, Hitchens does note that killing
priests and nuns should not be excused. However, he goes on to add that “the
long association of religion with corrupt secular power has meant that most
nations have to go through at least one anticlerical phase, from Henry VIII
through Cromwell to the French Revolution…the church in Russia was the
protector of serfdom and the author of anti-Jewish pogroms…” (p. 244). The
references here are to incredibly bloody and unpopular revolutions which
in every case left their host countries far worse off in almost every way (once
the enormous amounts of blood had been cleared away to make room for the police
states that followed the “anticlerical phase” that most nations “have to go
through”). After all, those laws of history can’t be halted by religious
peasants, can they? And, of course, no mention of the extreme bloodlust of the
secular French Revolution which, according to Simon Schama,12 was
central to the whole enterprise.

All of these distortions merely cover over the fact that
rebellion against Logos hasn’t failed to massacre and desecrate and trample
upon human life wherever it takes up its wretched cause. As for the point that
totalitarian regimes share with religion certain basic features, even a cursory
look at pre-revolutionary societies and post-revolutionary should confirm the
radical differences between the two.

IV

Both Nazis and communists have had a great regard for
Darwin’s theory of evolution and have tried to justify their ideologies (and
murderous activities) by vague allusions to it. Hitchens, unsurprisingly,
thinks Darwin gives him a weapon to reveal the absurdity of various religious
claims. In attempting to do this he offers a potted version of what biologist
Richard Dawkins has been writing about for years. Unfortunately, Dawkins makes
basic errors in his account of evolution, such as apparently assuming that
fundamental particles are so simple as to need no explanation. As Stanley Jaki
has put it: “What Dawkins tries to achieve by this claim is that there is no
need to invoke a creator. Actually he loses hold on the universe itself which
is anything but ‘simple,’ that is, non-specific.”13

Let us accept that there are three main elements to Darwins’s
theory: a) the claim that new species originated from older ones, b) the claim
that the emergence of the new species is due primarily to Natural Selection, c)
the claim that, following the above, structures that are apparently purposive
arise through non-purposive mechanisms. The tendency of Hitchens to relapse
into the kind of teleological language that this theory is supposed to have
made redundant is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate that Hitchens does not
delve at all into these — surely central — areas. Hitchens the materialist
effectively takes Darwinism as a given, assuming that all living things arose
from inorganic matter. Even the biological materialist J. B. S. Haldane saw
what might follow from such a theory: “If my mental processes are determined
wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my
beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them
sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be
composed of atoms.”14

But leaving this aside, Hitchens has nothing to say about the
following problems. An eye sees (or is an organ for seeing) because it has a
particular structure. Darwinism is supposed to explain how an eye got the
determinate structure it got, and if life is defined via natural selection
surely we should be able to find an evolutionary explanation for its origin.
Such a theory cannot assume as a starting point a determinate nature. So it
must assume a somewhat indeterminate nature (hence Dawkins’ concern with the
“simple”). If this indeterminate nature is merely a capacity for everything (or
nothing?) from where does it derive the determination which kicks off the
evolutionary process? Obviously not from itself, but presumably from something
which determines itself and so acts with purpose and intention.15

The issue is never alluded to by Hitchens, nor are the
well-known problems of the evolutionary interpretation of homology, the fossil
record etc.16 Given the weakness of the case presented by Hitchens it is
not surprising that he devotes much time and space to a distracting attack on
the “Argument from Design,” an argument that, in some versions, seems to posit
a Divine Creator via an empirical proof of special creation.

The cosmological argument is a metaphysical argument which,
to be fair, Hitchens makes a tiny bit of room for and also avoids the worst
attempt at answering.17 Given the weakness of the ontological argument (at least as
presented by St Anselm and refuted by St Thomas Aquinas), Hitchens seeks to
refute the cosmological argument by reducing it to the former. As Hitchens has
it, Kant “overthrew the cosmological proof of god – which suggested that one’s
own existence must posit another necessary existence – by saying that it only
restated the ontological argument…And he undid the ontological argument by
challenging the simpleminded notion that if god can be conceived as an idea, or
stated as a predicate, he must therefore possess the quality of existence” (p.
265).

Firstly, such an argument would not deal with all of Aquinas’
Five Ways, each of which claims to be a proof of the existence of God (they are
not all substantially the same). Secondly, the cosmological argument only seeks
to prove an attribute of God – his necessary being – not what Kant assumes,
i.e. a being whose very existence is logically included in the concept of its
essence. By arriving independently at God’s existence as a necessary being
Aquinas then goes on to show that a necessary being which exists must,
by logical deduction, be a being in which essence and existence are identical.

I appreciate that Hitchens is not a philosopher, but suggest
that a simple reading of some introductory texts might disabuse him of some of
the ideas he is happy to spread to thousands around the world — ideas that may
have quite an impact on people’s lives.

V

As suggested at the beginning, Hitchens seems to hold a
particular dislike for a personal God. As a secular Jew, he is contemptuous of
the beliefs of religious Jews and of much of the Old Testament. He is much more
lenient when it comes to Deism. The idea that a necessary and perfect being
lacks the perfections of Intelligence and Will that define a Person and are
present in all the persons this entity has made is perplexing, but discussions
of this type will have to wait.

Hitchens cites all sorts of passages from the Old Testament
designed to show that religion is barbaric and God cruel. For a professor who
teaches and knows about English literature, Hitchens has a tin ear when it
comes to Old Testament stories. When describing the story of Abraham and Isaac
he can only see attempted murder. He fails to realise that the Giver of life
has every right to end life (all of us die, after all) and take the person who
has died to Himself. This does not justify murder, for no man may take it upon
himself to murder a human being made in the image of God. But that God might
act through a human agent to achieve His aim in special circumstances does not
make God evil or capricious, any more than the fact that humans are mortal as
regards their earthly life.

Isaac is not killed (which for Hitchens doesn’t seem to count
for much), and human sacrifice was never practised or sanctioned by the Church
– indeed it was condemned in vehement terms (though practised frequently by
pagans). It’s a bit rich of Hitchens, who endorses the modern “sacrifice” of
abortion and indeed of people like Terri Schiavo, to condemn the non-fatal
sacrifice of Isaac!

Of course, the story of Abraham and Isaac prefigures the
ultimate sacrifice of Christ at Calvary. Here is what Hitchens makes of the
whole story of the Passion:

If Christian orthodoxy is valid, then
Judaism is futile: a pointless hanging-about for the arrival of the Messiah,
who has already shown up. Why not just admit this…. If the Jewish leadership
had any guts, it would turn on those who taunt it with “Christ-killing” and
say, “Yeah, all right, since you keep mentioning it, we did you a favour. Judas
too. Where would your faith be without us?”18

Such reasoning might, of course, justify the Holocaust too.
But it does give us an insight into that deep aversion to Christ which Hitchens
shares with more religious opponents of Christianity. Hitchens, like Rousseau,
seems to regard the doctrine of Original Sin as a blasphemy. What happened at
Calvary (and whether or not you believe in God, it did happen, according to
respectable historians of the period) is inexorably bound up with Original Sin.
That through Adam’s faithlessness he became incapable of handing down certain
gifts is in no way absurd (or “unfair”). And that there are, at least, certain
extrinsic impairments of our natural energies and faculties is surely attested
to by everyday experience.

According to Christian doctrine, Christ the God-man chose to
suffer and to die in order to atone for our sins. On one view of this, only an
infinite being could atone for the infinite offence that human sin gives to the
Creator. Whether one believes this or not (and there is certainly much more to
say on the subject), it is not obviously illogical or absurd, once one accepts
the idea of a personal God.

For Hitchens, though, “Once again we have a father
demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the
father… is god, and he is trying to impress humans…. I am told of a
human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago…. In consequence of this
murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy
everlasting life” (p. 209).

As Hitchens himself appears to acknowledge, it is my sin here
and now that makes me in part responsible for what is a timeless event (Christ
is God, remember, and is thus uniquely capable of representing mankind). His
sacrifice possesses an infinite value because he is Logos, and it is made out
of love for me because there is nothing I would be capable of doing “naturally”
(i.e. according to my fallen nature) that could adequately atone for my sins.
However, what this does not mean is that I may sin – for the sacrifice
atones in that it gives me the possibility of overcoming sin, but that is a
radical choice that I must make and keep making throughout my life. He died for
all, but not all will choose His way and the way of the moral law.

For someone who has written about religion for a long time
and has now produced a best-selling book about it, one might not unreasonably
have hoped that Hitchens would have read just a little more theology.

Elsewhere Hitchens tiresomely resurrects some old biblical
chestnuts. To give just one example, he writes “Saint Matthew… [based]
everything on a verse or two from the prophet Isaiah which told King Ahaz...
that ‘the Lord shall give you a sign; a virgin will conceive and bear a son.’ ”
Hitchens adds “we know that the word translated as ‘virgin’, namely almah,
means only ‘young woman’” (p. 115).

Fine, except that the word can mean either, and it would
hardly be a miraculous sign for a young woman to give birth!

Hitchens’ faulty understanding of the Old Testament extends
to his repeated claim in debates that, unlike the New, it never alludes to
Hell. Perhaps he should look at, say, Judith 16.20-21 or Isaiah 66.24.

VI

As if all this weren’t depressing enough, Hitchens seems to
assume (without realising it) that virtue is simply beyond the grasp of human
beings. He states, just after referring to Catholics, that: “The essential
principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey….
Human are not so constituted to care for others as much as themselves…. Urging
humans to be superhumans… is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their
repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules” (pp. 212-213).

The concept of grace and the lives of the saints seem to
completely elude Hitchens. While perceptive about man’s fallen state, Hitchens
fails to learn from those who did open themselves up to God’s will and are
generally regarded as the greatest humans that ever lived. Hitchens may sneer
at a Saint Francis, but didn’t he actually show us how it is possible for a
human to be, in a sense, superhuman, precisely because he acted upon graces
that went beyond Hitchens’ naturalism?

And it is this refusal to acknowledge that if there is a
personal God, there is such a thing as grace given by him that makes Hitchens’
efforts hopeless. Even if one doesn’t believe, one should at least be able to
see the logic of the Christian position or even, if one opens one’s eyes, the
special virtues of the Saints. Hitchens repeatedly makes the point that people
knew about moral precepts before Sinai. He is right; they had an idea of the
natural moral law. Do the religious deny this? The point about the Chosen
People and Sinai is that they were given gifts to make the following of that
law prima facie easier. And the graces that derive from Calvary are
unimaginably greater gifts, which we refuse because we prefer vice. But they
are, nonetheless, here, and we can see these graces at work if we choose to.

One person who many think was particularly receptive to God’s
graces was Mother Teresa. Hitchens has already attacked her in a tastefully
titled book.19Here
he repeats the story he told with regard to the supposed miracle that writer
Malcolm Muggeridge said he witnessed, in relation to Mother Teresa’s Home of
the Dying, during the production of the film Something Beautiful for God.
Muggeridge claimed that in the processed film of the visit, the part taken
inside the Home was “bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the
part taken outside was rather dim and confused…” (p. 145). The point was that
inside the Home was dimly lit whereas it was sunny outside, which was also
filmed. In Muggeridge’s words: “I am absolutely convinced that the technically
unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers
to in his well-known exquisite hymn…This is precisely what miracles are for –
to reveal the inner reality of God’s outward creation” (pp. 145-146).

Hitchens, in view of these claims, quotes the cameraman of
the film, Ken MacMillan:

we had just taken delivery at the BBC of
some new film made by Kodak which we hadn’t had time to test…. And when we got
back several weeks later…we are sitting in the rushes theatre at Ealing Studios
and eventually up come the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was
surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, “That’s amazing. That’s
extraordinary.” And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for
Kodak. I didn’t get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in
the front row, spun round and said: “It’s divine light! It’s Mother Teresa... ”
(p. 146).

It’s a good story. It’s also just a part of the story — the
only part that interested Hitchens. The well-known English journalist Richard
Ingrams, in his engrossing biography of Muggeridge,20notes that Macmillan
further stated that when he used the same film in similar light conditions (to
Mother Teresa’s House of the Dying) some time afterwards in a Cairo nightclub
the results were unusable. There was also an incident on a subsequent
filming by MacMillan in the BBC’s In the Steps of St. Paul. Alec
Vidler and Malcolm Muggeridge were set up to be walking along a lonely road
discussing St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Dasmascus. When this other
Ken MacMillan film was processed Peter Chafer (director of Something
Beautiful for God) noticed that at one point the two figures in the
shimmering heat were joined by a third, who seemed to walk with them before
disappearing.

Hitchens has read Ingrams’ biography and has been told,
personally, by Ingrams that he ought to at least interview Chafer, a
level-headed non-believer, about these events. Apparently when it comes to
allegations of the miraculous, proper investigation is not favoured by this particular
non-believer.

VII

Talk of miracles and grace leads us to contemplate a question
that Hitchens has been asking in debates: Can you think of a single good act
done by a religious person that could not also have been done by a
non-religious person?

An obvious answer to the question might be – to exorcise a
demon, or to offer up an atoning sacrifice to God for the sins of oneself or
others. Hitchens will, of course, reject such an answer because it appeals to
the supernatural. Well, surprise, surprise! It is merely tautologous to hold
that a non-religious person can achieve a natural good, as can a religious
person. For both operate at the natural level! Moreover, that a religious
person, with the aid of special graces, may find it easier to achieve certain
natural goods is not a proposition discussed by Hitchens.

Perhaps Hitchens’ views here affect (or are affected by) his
views on Church teaching on sexual ethics. Hitchens declaims “One could write
an entire book that was devoted only to the grotesque history of religion and
sex, and to holy dread of the procreative act and its associated impulses and
necessities…” (p. 215).21

And I thought the Catholic Church was often criticised
precisely because it was one of the few institutions that insists that a truly
loving sexual act must be of a procreative type! Perhaps Hitchens should take a
look at Humanae Vitae. Whilst devoting quite a few pages to sex (and
implying that the Church is obsessed with the subject) Hitchens, towards the
end of the book, writes: “the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the
sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be
attempted” (p. 283). As I write these words in London, one of the more secular
cities in the world, the STD rate skyrockets after years of condom-promotion,
sexualized advertising, and a general denigration of the institution of
marriage, which is love and the life-long commitment structured around a
reverence for the marital union and its appropriate physical expression.
Hitchens’ dream has been tried and has failed.

It’s a pattern with Hitchens’ dreams. In reflecting on
another failed experiment he once went along with Hitchens tells us: “The
concept of historical and dialectical materialism was not an absolute and it
did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in
the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive… but the fact had to be faced:
there was no longer any guide to the future…. The very concept of a total
solution has led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention
of excuses for them” (pp. 151-153).

With no hint of irony, this nihilistic revolutionary
“converted” to the idea of an endless “war on terror” to wipe out
fundamentalism, fascism, anti-Americanism, leftism, anti-Semitism etc. at the
cost of countless innocent lives, usually those of the poor. He pursues his
messianic vision, Barrabas-like in his fervour, Caiaphas-like in his seeming
indifference to the victims of the policies he supports.

Hitchens the “revolutionary” is proud of his heritage.
Perhaps he concurs with the British journalist Melanie Phillips, who
interestingly sees the neoconservative view of the world as “a demonstrably
Jewish view. Christians see man as a fallen being, inherently sinful. The
neocons have the Jewish view that mankind has a capacity for both good and ill.
Christians believe humanity is redeemed through Christ on the cross; the neocon
approach is founded on the belief that individuals have to redeem themselves….
Neocons believe in taking the world as it is, but encouraging the good and
discouraging the bad. It is this impulse to tikkun olam that gives the
neocons the optimism that so distresses old-style paleo-conservatives…[T]he
neocons belief that good can prevail over evil…lay behind the wars against
Afghanistan and Iraq.”22

Cognisant of these messianic tendencies in Hitchens, the
enlightened Jew Norman Finkelstein notes that: “contemptuous of ‘transient
polls of opinion,’ he’s still a Trotskyist at heart, guiding the benighted
masses to the Promised Land, if through endless wars and safely from the rear.”23

If
only Hitchens — and all of us — were to take our bearings more from Calvary and
less from self-assertive political factions, perhaps endless wars in ourselves
and outside ourselves might be avoided. At any rate, if I were Hitchens I would
not, as he does, take the injunction to “Know yourself” as one of the
“consolations of philosophy” (p. 283).24

1
On Not Knowing the Half of It: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs,
collected in Prepared for the Worst (Hogarth Press 1988) pp.345-357
(Italics added). Christopher's brother Peter, a Protestant and
counter-revolutionary, appears to assign no great significance to his Jewish
heritage.

2
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/hitchens_hubris/
Hitchens generously allow that “Religious faith is, precisely because we
are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable… For this reason, I would not
prohibit it even if I thought I could.” (p. 12). For “this reason”? Does he
mean that if it were not for this reason he would seek to prohibit
religion?

3
Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections, Meeting with
the Representatives of Science, University of Regensburg, 12th September 2006.

4
It is clear from the text that Hitchens also supports deliberate abortion in
these circumstances – presumably as a form of (non-voluntary) euthanasia.
Hitchens, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a major cheerleader for the intentional
killing by omission of Terri Schiavo (whom Hitchens claimed was “dead” despite
all evidence). For Hitchens on Schiavo see http://www.slate.com/id/2115860/.
For some actual medical information on the case, a good place to start is:

5
Mbulaiteye SM, Mahe C, Whitworth JA, et al. Declining HIV-1 incidence and
associated prevalence over 10 years in a rural population in SW Uganda: a
cohort study; Lancet; 2002; 360:41-46. According to a recent study by two
experts in the field: “the government [from the beginning] communicated a clear
warning and prevention recommendation: AIDS or ‘slim’ was fatal and required
immediate population responses based on ‘zero-grazing’, that is, faithfulness
to one partner. Condoms were a minor component of the original strategy”
(my emphasis). Low-Beer D, Stoneburner RL. Population-level HIV declines and
behavioural risk avoidance in Uganda: Science; 2004; 304: 714-718.

6
Allen T. and Heald S. HIV/AIDS Policy in Africa, What has worked in Uganda and
what has failed in Botswana?, Journal of International Development;
2004;16;1141-1154 . Further, a 2003 UNAIDS review of the effectiveness of
condom campaigns concluded: “…the public health benefit of condom promotion in
settings with widespread heterosexual transmission remains unclear. In countries
like Uganda that have curbed generalized epidemics, reducing numbers of
partners appears to have been more important than condoms. Other countries
continue with high HIV transmission despite high condom use”.http://www.usp.br/nepaids/condom.pdfp2. The precise
impact of C (condoms) on the efficacy of ABC campaigns is unknown since there
is no evidence to show that C, as a supporting strategy, has a beneficial
effect. To assume that it does is to assume on the basis of no evidence. It
should also be noted that there are some moral principles which may not be
sacrificed in the name of an ‘efficient’ strategy, even assuming it really is
efficient.

12
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Penguin Books 2004).
What might we think of someone who announced that purges of Jews were
“necessary” stages that states “have to go through” because Jews historically
have made accommodations with “corrupt secular power” – i.e. those societies
had to go through an “anti-Jewish” phase?

14
Quoted in Jaki p. 153. As regards suggestions that functions formed by natural
selection underlie the meaningfulness of mental states, philosopher Edward
Feser points out: “…if a desire to avoid cheetahs happened to be hard-wired
into our ancestors as a result of their interactions with both cheetahs and
tigers-in-certain-circumstances…then it would seem to follow that the
biological function of this desire is to get us to avoid both cheetahs and
tigers-in-certain-circumstances – and thus it would follow too that the desire
represents, not cheetahs uniquely, but rather cheetahs OR
tigers-in-certain-circumstances….the biological theory cannot deal with
cases of mental states whose meaning or intentional content is determinate or
ambiguous…even if all our mental states were indeterminate or ambiguous in
their meaning or content, this would not save the theory; for even if the
theory could explain why they have ambiguous meanings, it would not explain why
they have meaning at all.” The Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction
(Oneworld 2005) pp. 147-148.

15
I am indebted here to R. P. Phillips, Modern Thomistic Philosophy Vol. 1 The
Philosophy of Nature (Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd. 1948). See also
Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Monarch Publications 1994) p. 109.
Johnson also makes the following perceptive point: “most scientists do not
understand that there is a difference between the scientific method of inquiry,
as articulated by Popper, and the philosophical program of scientific
naturalism…they fear the growth of religious fanaticism if the power of
naturalistic philosophy is weakened. But whenever science is enlisted in some
other cause – religious, political, or racialistic – the result is always that
the scientists themselves become fanatics.” (p. 154).

17
His friend biologist Richard Dawkins, after grossly misstating Aquinas’
cosmological argument, basically asks, in The God Delusion ‘who created
the Creator?’, thus revealing both ignorance of the argument and an astounding
arrogance (Dawkins can see this rebuttal, but all those famous philosophers
must have missed it!)

21
And yet Christianity has defended the institution of marriage when it is under
threat. It is within traditional marriage that, as the philosopher J.L.A Garcia
has noted, “the presocial, animal, infantile aspects of sex…are properly set
within such a context that they are humanized. These primitive aspects
of the self that sexual behaviour should contain can be humanized by the
marriage background because they are integrated into a real and mutually
respectful relationship, planned as a communal sharing, and properly committed
to generating, socializing, and nurturing new members of society.” Liberal
Theory, Human Freedom, and the Politics of Sexual Morality, collected in
Paul J. Weithman (ed.) Religion and Contemporary Liberalism (University
of Notre Dame Press 1997) p. 230.